9. March 2008 by Ben.

It’s surprisingly enthralling watching Amy Walker introduce herself twenty-one times.

The trick is she does it each time with a different accent – London, Dublin, Belfast, Scotland, Italy, Germany, Prague, Moscow, Paris, Sydney, Wellington, Australia, Texas, California, Seattle, Toronto, Brooklyn, Charleston…

I like Dublin and Charleston best.

This reminds me of the Speech Accent Archive from George Mason University, which currently has 866 samples of people from around the world reading the same sample of text.  (They even have a category for American Sign Language, though it’s empty.  I’m not sure how they think that’s gonna work.)

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9. March 2008 by Ben.

My bank has sent me confirmation paperwork for the new terms of a Certificate of Deposit I rolled over. Technically this rollover happened two months ago, and it’s only a three month CD, but I guess it’s more important to produce massive amounts of paperwork than that anyone ever reads them.

This paperwork includes a booklet titled “Account Information.” It’s 100 pages long (50 in English, 50 in Spanish). That’s fine; there’s a lot of important legal information to convey in banking.

It also includes a second booklet titled “Account Information – Addendum.” It too is 50 pages long (50 in English, 0 in Spanish). In the era of computers they really couldn’t just merge these?

But the kicker is the one solitary additional page at the very back of the massive packet titled, I swear, “Account Information – Amendments to the Addendum”

Amendments to the Addendum! Amendments to the Addendum? Seriously?

At least now I know why it took them two months.

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